Quitter: Closing the Gap Between Your Day Job and Your Dream Job

90 percent perfect and shared with the world always changes more lives than 100 percent perfect and stuck in your head.

I don't want you to wake up at sixty-five and realize, 'I spend forty of my best years doing something that just funded my life.

Pitting your dream against someone else's is a fantastic way to get discouraged and depressed.

I want the peace in knowing that is wasn’t for lack of hustling that I missed a target for my dream. I want to know that the one thing in my control was under control.

Hustle isn't just doing the things you love all the time. Hustle is doing the things you don't enjoy sometimes to earn the right to do the things you love.

More often than not, finding out what you love doing most is about recovering an old love or an inescapable truth that has been silenced for years, even decades. When you come to your dream job, your thing, it is rarely a first encounter. It's usually a reunion.

We didn't try to force God's hand or do the "I just heard a sermon about David and Goliath so I need to quit my job right this second" leap of faith that's so popular in Christian circles. We took our time with the decision, like another guy in the Bible, named Jesus. He spent thirty years in obscurity before he started his adventure. Often, we're not willing to spend thirty minutes in preparation, never mind thirty years, especially when we come home from a conference and find our day jobs waiting for us on Monday morning. I'm not sure why Christians sometimes think the maturation of our own missions will be radically shorter than that of Jesus. But it happens and in the past I've certainly wanted to take wild, unplanned, possibly-not-inspired-by-God leaps of faith.

I know sometimes it's scary to think that you might do the wrong thing. It's terrifying to imagine wasting your "one shot". But let me assure you, nothing you do will be wasted. Every decision you make, every path you take, has the ability to contribute something you need to succeed at your dream.

The golden watch has become the other end of golden handcuffs. We now look at steady jobs as less of a goal and more of a necessary evil. They aren't fun; they simply fund our lives.

You have the perfect amount of time each day for the things that matter most. The key is spending time on those things.

Burn your dream bright. Pursue it with the best of who you are. But don't confuse hustle with burnout. Hustle fills you up. Burnout empties you. Hustle renews your energy. Burnout drains it.

Your dream might not be as extreme as Bono's, but like him you may meet yours before you're ready to run after it.

Quitting a job doesn't jump-start a dream because dreams take planning, purpose, and progress to succeed. That stuff has to happen before you quit your day job.

We started seeing motion as a sign of success and transition as a sign of progress.

People position adulthood like it’s the end of your life, not the beginning. You’ve had your fun. Now it’s time to grow up. You’ve lived it up. Now it’s time to start dying.

The problem is that “by now” is a phrase we say to ourselves when we’re trying to believe the lie that it’s too late to start pursuing our dream.

the best way to crush the discussion, is with a decision.

If I miss a goal, which sometimes happens when you set huge ones, I want the reassurance that I did everything I in my power to make it happen. I want the peace in knowing that it wasn't for lack of hustling that I missed a target for my dream. I want to know that the one thing under my control was under control.

I know it sounds crazy, but people with jobs tend to have more creative freedom than people without.

When you keep your day job, all opportunities become surplus propositions rather than deficit remedies. You only have to take the ones that suit your dream best.

You might be too bored to work on your dream, but just don’t buy into the lie that you are too busy.

each dream comes wrapped in some degree of risk. If it doesn’t, it’s not really a dream.

Doing work you love is not about doing work that is fun all the time or even feels good all the time. Regardless of your dream, there are going to be hard moments. You’ll have to do things you don’t necessarily enjoy or don’t necessarily have an easy time doing.

You only find enough when you tell enough where to be found.

As in, “You have enough, don’t let the dream you’re chasing blind you to the life you already have.

Measure hustle first. I think measuring the effort you’re putting in is a much more honest gauge of your progress. It’s also the only part of this process you can really control. There are a million factors that play into getting traffic on a website or closing a sale or any other sign of a “hit” for your dream. There is only one who impacts the amount of hustle. You.

you can’t allow your results or the measurement of your progress to control your dream. What you do, the message, so to speak, has to be true and honest and come from the core of what you care about, not be a whim in the whirling winds of analytics.

But if it were easy to execute a dream, everyone would do it and your dream wouldn’t be so spectacular.

It didn’t “feel like work at all.” It flowed out of you with very little effort. I was wrong. Chasing your dream is not like that. Fulfilling your dream is not like that. Closing the gap between a day job and a dream job is not really like that.